realitaetsverlust

Every day, the words “Violent Uprising” sound a lot less problematic in my ears.

I know you probably did this for the meme but the fact that you can buy a hotdog in installments is kinda … yeah, idk. I’m lacking the vocabulary to describe my current state of mind.

You don’t understand.

It’s not about people being easier to control without porn. It’s about creating the first stepping stone. Instead of going the full authoritarian route of “Access to the internet requires login at a government portal and you’re being tracked wherever you go online”, you start with small things. Age verification on devices to “protect the children”, making “abhorrent” porn illegal - you put the first elements into place. Those things are hard to argue against - nobody wants to admit he’s watching porn, and you can’t really argue against “protecting the children” without looking cruel in the public eye. Once that is done, you can start expanding on those. Then it’s not just age verification on device, but also a government ID tied to you online, all to “combat terrorism” of course.

And if you give it more time, you’re being woken up by the humming sound of a security drone in front of your window on 04.03.2045 in a full authoritarian state.

They don’t care about porn. But it’s an easy stepping stone for full internet control.

Who says they’d need to?

We have a certain standard of living right now that is only maintainable that way.

we’d make glass and clay pots

Lmao.

people doing jobs for the money rather than less demand would actually mean people wouldn’t even need a set job

Yes, that’s how it generally works. Most jobs that people expect this day and age are not enjoyable. Are there people who’d do them for free? Yes. But not on a massive scale that works for billions of people.

Look at Animals, how many animals work 2 jobs just to survive?

What a retarded comparison. Probably the dumbest you could’ve made.

Animals don’t have access to a network of goods and services, they also don’t live in a city with potentially millions of inhabitants. They don’t have internet, they don’t have healthcare, they don’t have delivery drivers, plumbing, electricity or anything that we know from modern life.

With all due respect, but if that’s something you strife for, get a few like minded people and go live on an island. Nobody is stopping you. There, you can live free of capitalism. But you also get all the disadvantages.

It amazes me how blinded people are to a capitalist free world

We had a capitalist free world and it was shit for the most part. People got killed, life expectancy was shit, education was shit, extreme poverty was rampant (WAY more than under capitalism) winters were harsh and potentially deadly - bro you talk like someone who just played 12 hours of manor lords straight. You’re romanticizing a time that was just straightup terrible for the most part.

And if you’re referring to “modern” communist countries, ask yourself why so many people try to flee from them and why the regimes actually made leaving the country illegal.

Look at the waste now, the plastic pollution and then look carefully at the next package you buy and ask “does this really need ‘this’ much packaging? Do i care if this new spade I bought with all its shiny cardboard and plastic protection, arrived with a scratch? But even if the TV was scratched, does it really matter so long as it worked as intended?

You’re talking about minor individual problems. How is this a problem that warrants the abolishment of capitalism? Why not just fix that singular problem? You’re finding a small scratch in the wallpaper of your house and instead of just fixing it, you want to tear down the entire house? All of these things are SOCIETAL problems that are not the fault of capitalism. Capitalism doesn’t force companies to use excessive plastic for each cucumber - it’s the customers expectation that makes companies do that.

If you removed money, imagine where we’d all be as a society

Probably dead or living in the stone age.

There’s so many jobs that people don’t enjoy but are necessary. Nobody enjoys working in the middle of an australian desert at 40°C in a lithium mine. Nobody enjoys collecting your stinking trash. Nobody enjoys sitting in a store for 8 hours a day, scanning groceries. Nobody enjoys working in a warehouse for 8 hours.

However, these jobs and many more are vital for todays society.

toxicity of money, wars and hate!

You make it sound like wealth and wars are an invention of capitalism and not something that has existed basically since the dawn of time, even as something you can observe in primates, albeit on a much smaller scale.

This is stupid. Valve telling developers “you can’t sell your game cheaper on other platforms than on steam” is taking the cake away alone.

First of all, that’s not entirely true - valve is demanding price parity, meaning long-term undercutting steam is not allowed (something absolutely normal in almost any larger e-commerce scenario btw), but they have no problem if you have sales or value-added offers on other platforms. Now, you can think about price parity what you think, I’m not the biggest fan of it either, but it’s a very common practice, not exclusive to steam and has nothing to do with anti-trust.

You somehow keep ignoring the fact that valve makes more money than any other corporation per employee. They are clearly over-charging and you cannot argue against this

I ignored it because it’s a retarded metric. Yeah, guess what, if you automate a lot, you’re going to need less employees. I have no clue how that has any relevance in if a product is worth it or not. I’m pretty sure the v-servers I’m renting from hetzner involve nobody, it’s all automated, from purchase to setup - should I get it for free now? Would it be fine to have a 30% cut if valve employed like 1000 more people or what is the logic here?

Stop defending megacorporations.

I’m not defending megacorporations, I just don’t agree with you at all. Fundamentally, you are saying “making money bad” which is just a naive and highly uneducated argument to have.

30% cut was fine when infrastructure was just not there yet, but 64GB HDD no longer costs 100€ and internet is not metered in megabytes.

Steam isn’t just storing stuff and letting people download it. They’re an entire distribution network. There’s not just the tech (which is already expensive in itself), but also the entire legal stuff. Invoicing, legal compliance, fraud prevention, chargeback processing, the customer support (which actually got fairly helpful in the last 2 years) etc.

If you genuinely think Valve and Gabe’s fleet of Yachts is not monopolistic squeezing/pricing

It’s not. Valve has not adjusted their pricing once, at least not upwards. They have reduced the pricing for extremely high-grossing games, but other than that, the price has stuck at 30%. How is that squeezing? Wouldn’t that make them INCREASE the percentage point instead of leaving it where it is?

Also, it’s funny that you talk about “monopolistic”, because epic has probably engaged in more monopolistic behavior with the EGS than steam ever has. And if we compare the features of the EGS (which didn’t even have a shopping cart for the first year of it’s existence) with the feature set of steam, I can absolutely see that a 30% cut is fine.

Now, could they lower it? Probably. But 30% is still worth it for any indie dev and significantly less than any other entity with the size and reach of steam would take for all their services.

They introduced a feature, the community didn’t like it, and they canceled it a few days later because of that feedback. What exactly is the problem? Making a mistake and rectifying it within days is not a bad thing at all.

Users are just more tolerant towards Valve than any other platform because of the cheap games they can buy during a sale

If that was the case, people would be extremely tolerant towards the epic game store which regularly throws out games for free, but they aren’t.

“doing nothing”

Global distribution of exabytes of data, handling the entire e-commerce side and offering great toolings with steamworks while requiring onyl 100 dollars upfront is now considered “nothing”. Yeah, we should definitely go back to a time when steam wasn’t a thing and indie devs were required to have a publisher to even get their games into stores, and those publishers often took 80% of the entire profits. I’m sure indies had a much better time back then when they didn’t have to pay steam!

One of the most accurate descriptions of this entire beef.

Steam does nothing and just keeps winning.

That user agent would make them easily identifiable and therefore blockable. It’s more likely that they are trying to hide as a legitimate user.

I would expect AI scrapers to fake a windows user-agent tbh.